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Police employ new tactics as suburban riots spread

Posted: Sunday, November 06, 2005

ACHERES, France - Youths armed with gasoline bombs fanned out from Paris' poor, troubled suburbs to shatter the tranquility of leafier towns, torching nearly 900 vehicles, a nursery school and other targets Saturday in the worst wave of arson since the violence began more than a week ago.

Police deployed a helicopter and small teams of officers to chase down youths who sped from one attack to another in cars and on motorbikes. The new security tactics yielded more than 250 arrests during the ninth straight night of unrest.

The violence - originally concentrated in neighborhoods northeast of Paris with large immigrant populations - is forcing France to confront anger long-simmering in its suburbs, where many Africans and their French-born children live on society's margins, struggling with unemployment, poor housing, racial discrimination, crime and a lack of opportunity.

Triggered by an outburst of fury over the deaths of two teenagers, the unrest has taken on unprecedented scope and intensity.

The violence hit far-flung corners of France on Saturday, from Rouen in Normandy to Bordeaux in the southwest to Strasbourg near the German border, but the Paris region has borne the brunt.

In Acheres, arsonists burned a nursery school and about a dozen cars in four attacks over an hour that the mayor said seemed "perfectly organized."

Children's photos clung to the blackened walls, and melted plastic toys littered the floor. Residents gathered at the school gate demanded that the army be deployed or suggested that citizens band together to protect their neighborhoods. Mayor Alain Outreman tried to cool tempers.

"We are not going to start militias," he said. "You would have to be everywhere."

In one particularly malevolent attack, youths in the eastern Paris suburb of Meaux prevented paramedics from evacuating a sick person from a housing project. They pelted rescuers with rocks, then torched the awaiting ambulance, an Interior Ministry official said.

By daybreak Saturday, 897 vehicles were destroyed - a sharp rise from the 500 burned a night earlier, police said. It was the worst one-day toll since the unrest erupted Oct. 27 following the accidental electrocution of the two teenagers who hid in a power substation, apparently thinking police were chasing them.

Anger has spread to the Internet, with blogs mourning the youths.

Along with messages of condolence and appeals for calm were insults targeting police, threats of more violence and warnings that the unrest will feed support for France's anti-immigration extreme right.

"Civil war is declared. There will no doubt be deaths. Unfortunately, we have to prepare," said a posting signed "Rania."

"We are going to destroy everything. Rest in peace, guys," wrote "Saint Denis."

Police detained 258 people overnight, almost all in the Paris region, and dozens of them will be prosecuted, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said after a government crisis meeting. He warned of possibly heavy sentences for burning cars.

"Violence penalizes those who live in the toughest conditions," he said.

Most rioting has been in towns with low-income housing projects where unemployment and distrust of police run high. But in a new development, arsonists were moving beyond their heavily policed neighborhoods to attack others with less security, said a national police spokesman, Patrick Hamon.

"They are very mobile, in cars or scooters. ... It is quite hard to combat" he said. "Most are young, very young, we have even seen young minors."

There appeared to be no coordination between separate groups in different areas, Hamon said. But within gangs, he added, youths are communicating by cell phones or e-mails. "They organize themselves, arrange meetings, some prepare the Molotov cocktails."

On Saturday morning, more than 1,000 people took part in a silent march in one of the worst-hit suburbs, Aulnay-sous-Bois. Local officials wore sashes in the red-white-and-blue of the French flag as they filed past housing projects and the wrecks of burned cars. One white banner read "No to violence."